True West Very Close to the Heart of Truth at the Alchemist

The dramatic heart of Sam Shepard's True West comes vividly to life on the intimate stage of the Alchemist Theatre this winter. Directed by Erin Nicole Eggers, the drama of two brothers feels intricately visceral.

I really liked the work of Eggers and company, but I had a lot of hang-ups with the aesthetics of the staging. I guess I’ll start-out with the bits that I disliked about the production. It’s weird: I knew I liked the play, but I honestly had no idea how much I did until I had watched the way it played-out in this particular incarnation and found myself flinching and wincing a bit at some of the visuals.

Some of the aesthetics of the production feel substantially out of synch with the era and the mood of the story. There’s an attractive mural breaking out across the back of the set that feels incongruous to me. It's not specifically prescribed in the script. There’s an earthbound gravity about Shepard’s drama that needs no such decoration. A stolen television that the older brother brings into the space at one point is clearly a later model than the vintage of the classic 1980 script. The younger brother is writing on a later-model electric typewriter with little apparent regard to the rhythm and cadence of actual typing. It feels inadvertently comic to see him writing on an electric typewriter that isn't actually plugged-in. The characteristic hum and groan of an old (but clearly post-1980) electric typewriter just isn’t there.

(My issues with the anachronistic typewriter may be more of a personal problem. In junior high school, I wrote on an old, khaki Sears Communicator electric typewriter. There’s a kind of magic in the groaning percussion of a late 1970s/early 1980s-era electric typewriter. It feels strange to have two characters writing something that clearly isn’t going to work because it’s not even plugged-in. It would almost be an interesting metaphor for the doomed nature of what they were working on were it not so clearly anachronistic. Okay...I have officially gone WAY TOO FAR in analyzing this, but it was a real issue for me. I should also point out that I really DID like the production.)

The typewriter wasn’t the only thing that felt slightly wrong to me. Some of the toasters later seen onstage are obviously from a more recent past. The wig worn by the older brother looks A LOT like a wig. It doesn’t look like a wig that would’ve necessarily made sense on this particular character in this particular era. Again--I’m splitting hairs with some of this, but so much of the script is so clearly grounded in the era that the drama appeared in. Shepard is writing about Hollywood in a very specific era. This late-1970s-era Hollywood isn’t terribly central to the plot, but a lot of the architecture of the script rides on that era. Little stylistic hints at later periods drag the production out of the illusion of that era.

This is not to say that there isn't a grittiness to some of the aesthetics here. There's actual smoke from (an herbal) cigarette. There's that distinct sound of an actual beer (PBR) pop-top being opened onstage. There’s that distinctive scent of toast at the appropriate time. Christopher Elst’s violence design on the show makes physical aggression seem uncomfortably real. As much as I’m making of the aesthetic shortcomings of the production early on in this review, they honestly feel like relatively minor distractions next to a largely engrossing dynamic between Jason Will and David Sapiro in the roles of younger brother and older brother respectively. Elst’s work aids this quite a bit, but the convincing aggression would be little more than a compelling stylistic detail if it weren’t firmly grounded in two excellent performances.

The younger brother is a screenwriter. Jason Will goes through quite a transformation in the role. He starts out as a very vulnerable, responsible and self-directed person. By the end of it all he’s quite the opposite, having lost himself in childish irresponsibility. Will’s sense of humor aids the performance immeasurably, particularly in the drunken toaster portion of the drama. There is the smell of toast wafting off the stage as he excitedly feeds toasters all over the set. Will’s arc from fragile maturity to a puttylike vortex of need is kind of breathtaking. The younger brother is conflicted throughout the early part of the story. He wants to help his brother out of a disreputable life, but he also has a great amount of contempt for decisions he’s made in his life and would rather not have anything to do with him at all. Will’s sharpness in the roll lies in a very intimate grasp of that conflict within the character. It’s fun to watch.

David Sapiro has charming swagger about him as the older brother. He's a drifter who evidently steals and cons his way through life. The character has a number of deliciously ugly layers--each one lying about or fabricating things in a different way for a different reason. That Sapiro can make it work and still seem reasonably sympathetic is quite an accomplishment. The character bites off more than he can chew as he commandeers the interest of a film producer his younger brother was working with and manages to get a project rolling in Hollywood. He’s completely at a loss for understanding the basic mechanics of writing, but here he is trying to work on a Hollywood screenplay. Sapiro handles the gradual downward spiral of the character’s journey with a cocky swagger, more than a little wit and quite a bit of charm.

Alchemist Theatre’s production of True West runs through Jan. 31 on 2569 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. in Bay View. For ticket reservations, visit thealchemisttheatre.com.

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